[log in to unmask] wrote:

> it's funny, but I've always seen Pound as against big money.

You introduce here an astonishingly complex issue of both theory
and history. I am not opposed to money; I am opposed to the
social relations that make money important. To be against big
money, as Pound is, has almost always, *in practice*, led to
racism and one or another form of authoritarian thought. It also
leads, usually, to one or another form of conspiracy theory.
The feature of Pound's poem that most directly links to its
fascist thrust is its ascription of social misery to the individual
evil of "money men." Placed in J. P. Morgan's social position,
you or I or Pound would act exactly as Morgan did (or soon
find ourselves displaced by someone who would). Hence Pound
is trying to sweep back the ocean in that beautiful passage
from Canto 41 beginning with "That they were to have a
consortium" and ending with "because you are all for the
*confine*." The great illusion of populist thought (and Pound
writes in that tradition) is that one can maintain the basic
social relations of capitalism but control the results of those
social relations.

You can, incidentally, see the same dynamic at work in what
is called "deep ecology," the logical (and all too often the
actual) results of which are arguments for genocide.

Carrol